Esther Poppe

Esther Poppe was born in Soltau, Germany and raised in South Africa and Botswana until 1994. She studied at the University of Arts and Design Offenbach, the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz, and read Theories of Dance & Choreography at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen.

For the last years her engagement with art education, curatorial practices, theoretical, philosophical and post-/de-colonial discourses has increased steadily and sparked her interest in shifting and re-defining conventional roles and boundaries. This has fundamentally changed the comprehension of her own artistic work as well as the process of creating, researching and exhibiting works in different contexts. The space, the conceptual content and the reflection of the process that the work derives from becomes a major part of the work itself.

It has become crucial to include and reflect these different approaches and develop forms in which a work can grow and address topics of transcendence, misunderstandings, dissonances, parallel states and marginal gaps within collaborative working groups. Fragmented states - of constant research, confusion and over saturation; she finds herself working within painting, site-specific installations, sculpture, methods of collaging, curation, writing, collective readings, filmmaking, performance, sound works and bringing nourishing experiences of all sorts back into community work. “Sometimes it feels like my collection of notebooks are my work (…s of art ambiguous, dialectically productive, at time subversive…)”

Since 2013 Poppe is a freelance educator at the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt, where they are currently conducting action research in the framework of TRACES - transmitting contentious cultural heritages with the arts.